-Banging your head against a wall burns 150 calories an hour.
-Pteronophobia is the fear of being tickled by feathers!
-“Facebook Addiction Disorder” is a mental disorder identified by Psychologists.
-The average woman uses her height in lipstick every 5 years.
-Cherophobia is the fear of fun.
-If you lift a kangaroo’s tail off the ground it can’t hop.
-Hyphephilia are people who get aroused by touching fabrics.

01-17-16 Happy Belated Birthday to:
1922 Betty White, actress; created memorable characters in TV sitcoms from the 1950s into the 21st century (Life with Elizabeth, Mary Tyler Moore, The Golden Girls, Hot in Cleveland) and was a popular guest on TV games shows. At age 88 and a half she became the oldest person ever to host Saturday Night Live (2010).

I don’t even remember most of the things about which I was upset back then, and now Quinn and I have a wonderful friendship. I now call him mein Pfarrer (“my Pastor” in German). Of course, I now understand a lot of things that I didn’t know then.

Happy things have evolved to a more positive situation/relationship Leeny!

Today’s Birthdays:

Born on January 19
1736 James Watt, Scottish inventor.
1807 Robert E. Lee, Confederate general during the American Civil War.
1809 Edgar Allan Poe, American author and poet (“Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee.”)
1839 Paul Cézanne, French post-Impressionist painter
1919 John H. Johnson, editor and publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines

Here’s another fun history link:http://www.historynet.com/magazines/ask-mr-history
Did Betsy Ross Ever Own the ‘Betsy Ross House’ in Philadelphia?
According to those who maintain it, neither Betsy Ross nor any of her five husbands owned the house that bears her name, which was built around 1840. They rented the premises between 1773 and 1786, running an upholstery business from it as well as residing there. Betsy, a Pennsylvania Quaker, was expelled from the Friends when she married Anglican John Ross in 1772, after which they rented the house.

That is a lovely thought, with all the joy Mozart’s music has brought the world over. Love the cat.

A far more solemn anniversary is the 71st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and an international day of remembrance of the Jewish, Romani (Gypsy) and other victims who were murdered in the camp complex. It also commemorates subsequent genocides and strives to prevent any more… While that liberation can’t even be described as “bittersweet” due to the vast number of dead and the sorry state of the survivors, we can leave this sombre day on a note as bittersweet as Mozart’s brilliant but too-short life. Today’s Google doodle is dedicated to the brilliant New Zealand astronomer Beatrice Tinsley, who made very important discoveries about the cosmos, but died of cancer at 40. She would have been 75 today. http://www.google.com/doodles/beatrice-tinsleys-75th-birthday Dedicating this to Moonshadow, of course!

Yes lagatta, it is know as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Sadly the survivors of Auschwitz are dying out. 🙁 But through testimonies and teaching the next generation will remember.

And they said, “From now on you do not answer by your name. Your name is your number.” And the delusion, the disappointment, the discouragement that I felt, I felt like I was not a human person anymore. —LILLY APPELBAUM LUBLIN MALNIK

Well, it is a lot different to die out from old age than to be murdered because some idiot thought you were “subhuman”! I had friends who were survivors, for “racial”, or political reasons or both, but all have died of old age. I do stil have a friend who had to wear the yellow star as a little girl in Paris (her Italian-Jewish family were saved by a nominally fascist Italian civil servant) and another friend who was in the Resistance in Normandy as a very young man – rather a teenager. He is very, very old and my other friend is not much younger.

Sadly, I also have a colleague of Rwandan origin who lost most of his large extended family there 50 years later…

You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find, returning in the evening,
Hot food and friendly faces:

Consider if this is a man
Who works in the mud,
Who does not know peace,
Who fights for a scrap of bread,
Who dies because of a yes or a no.
Consider if this is a woman
Without hair and without a name,
With no more strength to remember,
Her eyes empty and her womb cold
Like a frog in winter.

Meditate that this came about:
I commend these words to you.
Carve them in your hearts
At home, in the street,
Going to bed, rising;
Repeat them to your children.

Or may your house fall apart,
May illness impede you,
May your children turn their faces from you.